Of course it takes longer and is easier to mess up (doesn't mean you end up with bug riddled code, like someone claimed).
How does "easier to mess up" not mean "you end up with bug riddled code"?
The developers on the original PSX titles were coding games in C and couldn't achieve anything but porkish performance and absolutely nothing for the first couple generations could achieve anything approaching arcade quality responsiveness and framerates.
I believe every single PSX game ever was mostly written in C, although there are a couple of early games that might have had parts written in assembler, because of the bugs in them. Tekken 2 has a bug that mostly goes unnoticed due to luck, which requires emulators be more accurate than Sony had envisaged. Otherwise it looks like
http://smf.mameworld.info/img/tekk0009.png Tekken and Tekken 2 were written for the arcade System 11 hardware first and then ported. System 11 appears to have been originally based on one of the PSX prototypes as the GPU is very different. At the end of System 11 life they started shipping with the PSX GPU, so a lot of games detect which GPU is fitted and adapt to it. Some versions of arcade Tekken 2 will run on the newer hardware, but the early versions won't. I suspect they used different tool chains or libraries for those games, which might be where the Tekken 2 bug comes from.
I think one of the tomb raider games has some odd register usage which someone speculated made it look like it was partly written in assembler too. The Saturn version was much worse than the PSX version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_2637363251&feature=iv&src_vid=q6oh_y9Tdao&v=z3GalI7AVj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgQP7JOqgsk I believe the Saturn was the lead platform & it shipped three months earlier than the PSX version.
http://www.game-rave.com/psx_galleries/battle_tombraider/index.htm The reason why the software became better was mostly due to the performance analyser telling you what was actually making your software slow. Up until then they had people blindly making low level optimisations crossing their fingers they would work, instead it would tell you that actually it's caused by cache misses which means you need to rewrite/restructure your engine to make it fit in the cache better. Other reasons could be that the GPU was being starved because you were overloading GTE, or maybe the GPU was saturated because you were trying to draw too much or were trying to use too many textures. You needed to be able to rapidly change your engine all the way through development and that puts assembler out of the question.
I believe Gran Turismo was the first game to be developed using the Performance Analyser. Namco did a faster version of ridge racer which was bundled with ridge racer type 4, it ran at 60fps instead of the original 30fps. I don't know whether they just used their experience or whether this benefited from the performance analyser.
When Namco wrote Ridge Racer the PSX didn't exist in it's finished form & the hardware was actually quite different. Once SN Systems talked them into using PC's for development and putting the console hardware onto ISA cards then the Target boxes were returned back to Sony. So not many of the DTL-H500 target boxes exist, so it's hard to tell how different. I don't think Namco went back and optimised it for the final hardware. The CD drive didn't exist when the wrote the game either, which is one of the reasons it is a single load and only uses the drive for red book audio at run time. They only got hold of a prototype drive after the game was finished.
I don't believe that Sega ever had any tools like the ones Sony had, so the PSX games just kept getting better. While Saturn had some good games, they were generally poor. It did well for 2d games because I think the fill rate for 2d might have been higher than the PSX. Also Sony banned 2d games in some regions for a while because they wanted to focus on 3d games, which might have been why the 2d shooters ended up on the Saturn.
The Saturn didn't have the true 3D acceleration that the PSX had
The Saturn had the exact same "3d" capabilities as the PSX. Both had hardware to do the 3d to 2d transforms as both GPU's could only render 2d, the main difference was the PSX scanned triangles and looked up the textures while the Saturn scanned the textures and plotted quads. The Saturn could draw the same screen coordinate more than one or not at all, which made the graphics look a bit wonky and made it hard to do transparency and gouraud shading. The PSX GPU could accept quads, but it split them into two or more triangles for rendering (it also has to split triangles sometimes too as the render has some specific requirements to reduce texture coordinate rounding errors) but this itself causes other rendering issues (though these can be worked round easier than the Saturn issues).
The Saturn had a 2d display chip as well & a 2nd cpu, which for games that were released on both formats was probably underutilised. You couldn't justify taking a game that ran and spend another year to make it run another 20% quicker when the market was so much smaller.
The only major low level optimisation that Sony introduced was inlining the GTE opcodes (geometry transform engine that does the 3d to 2d transformations) originally you called them through a function as they tried to hide and abstract everything about the hardware so that future consoles could be backward compatible. They backed off in this circumstance because they measured the effect. Sony really tried hard to make developers write software that was portable to different hardware. There were three main revisions of retail PSX, which all ran at different speeds. Games with race conditions are a problem if you only test on one speed of console, but it mostly worked out. It wasn't until the PS2 where the PSX GPU is software emulated & they have to patch games to make them run properly. The had to do something similar for the PS3 backward compatibility, they advertised that job on their web site. There are no 100% accurate PSX emulators out there, because nobody even knows what that means (including it seems Sony as they can't even emulate the 100% GTE accurately).
IMO the PSX is like the Amiga, while the Saturn is like the ST. In the next generation the PS2 was like the Saturn, the dreamcast and xbox was like a PC and the gamecube was the nicest hardware. The 360 and PS3 were pretty similar due to Microsoft buying the PS3 CPU from IBM (read the book
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Race-New-Game-Machine-The/dp/0806531010). Sony kept their tradition of making more and more complex hardware that required low level optimisation for it to work properly, which is what finished Ken Kutaragi's career. They've both gone back to PC hardware now, with ram type being the main difference. Which introduces interesting issues for cross platform games.
